Daily Archives: 2/13/2006

Bending Spacetime in the Basement

Gravity is a very, very weak force.  Back in 1798, Cavendish used a torsion balance to try to estimate the value of G, the gravitational constant.   What’s cool is that you can reproduce this experiment yourself.   Check out Bending Spacetime in the Basement, which includes some nifty videos of the torsion balance in action.

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On caring for partially wild kitties…

It’s now 4:04AM on Monday, and I’m up, typing on my laptop.

Not by choice, mind you. Like most people, I have 40 hours to put in over the next week, and like most people I don’t get enough sleep as it is. But Scrappy is a handful during the night.

You see, he’s still really a feral cat. This means two things:

  1. He’s active at night.
  2. He wants to be outside. A lot.

I’m supposed to keep him quiet and not have any serious exercise, but I’m also supposed to keep him inside. These two goals are simply not compatible. I went to bed about midnight, and slept until about 1:30AM. Then, he started banging his head against my bedroom door. So, I placed him in the downstairs bathroom. Whereupon he urinated all over everything, tore stuff off the wall, and generally had every panic reaction you could imagine.

Now, it’s 4:08AM, and while I’m downstairs on the couch, he seems content (for the moment) to rest at the foot of the couch. I’m hoping it lasts for a couple of hours. Maybe I’ll try to learn something more about Asterisk, and pray for the sun to come up.

I’m supposed to take him to the vet at 9:00. They are supposed to remove his drains and then I can take him home, but frankly if I can’t let him go outside, I’m going to have to have him boarded for a couple of days, for his sanity and mine.

Okay, just for mine really. He’s now crying once every couple of minutes, and the funny thing is, I understand exactly. Neither of us is having the night that we want to. I hope he’s better soon.